Pages

25 May 2012

Statement of Canadian and International Solidarity with the Quebec Student Strike

For more than 100 days, hundreds of thousands of Quebec university and college
students, backed by dozens of student unions and associations, have held
hundreds of daytime and dozens of nighttime demonstrations to affirm that
education is a right. They are also expressing a complete rejection of measures
that are designed to fundamentally reorient society toward increased
privatization of public services, the commodification of education, and the
enclosure of public space. The Canadian public has a stake in this struggle,
just as Quebec taxpayers have funded university education only to see their
public investment increasingly siphoned off by private/corporate interests which
are now threatening to divest the public even more. All this has taken place
without any public debate, which is essential in a society that committed
itself to free public education as part of a hard won social contract.

Indeed,
one of the reasons that Quebec has the lowest tuition fees in Canada is due to
the fact that for the last forty years, Quebec students have stood up to
governments every time that they tried to renege on this goal of working toward
free higher education. Regardless of the party in power, technocrats have
always tried to “balance the books” on the back of students, and generation
after generation of students have taken to the street and said “no”. The
difference between Quebec tuition fees and those in other parts of Canada and
North America is the product of this sustained vigilance and activism by
students, since 1968. The current government saw this historical legacy of
social movements as a potential for the growth of its income. If the government
has its way, it plans to wipe out the historical material gains of the student
movement within five years, and will call it “catching up” with the neighbours.

Faced
with calls from students, professors, trade unions, and many others across the
country for a reasoned public consultation and negotiation, the ruling Liberal
Party under Premier Jean Charest responded first with silence, then with
denunciations, mockery, half-hearted attempts at limited talks, and all the
while meeting students in the streets with violence. Most recently, the Charest
government has sought to criminalize dissent, passing Public Law 78 which
severely curtails basic democratic rights to freedom of expression and public
assembly and is reminiscent of the War Measures Act of the 1970s when then
Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau blatantly infringed on people’s civil
liberties. It also needs to be understood as a law in line with legislation
passed with increasing frequency around the world as elites, under the banner
of “austerity,” attempt to facilitate a new round of accumulation by
dispossession, bankrupting social support systems and engaging in an
historically unprecedented transfer of public wealth into private hands in an
effort to rescue global capitalism. The criminalization of dissent is an elite
strategy aimed at stifling the popular rage generated as a result of this
dispossession. The passing of this law has had the reverse effect intended,
actually increasing the strikers’ resolve and galvanizing new people to join in
condemning this draconian measure. This law has also been vigorously criticized
as a violation of citizens’ rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by
the Quebec Bar Association, and denounced by the Canadian Association of
University Teachers, La Fédération québécoise des professeures et professeurs
d'université (FQPPU), and a dozen or more faculty unions in the province.

The
blame for the current mass political conflict in Quebec lies at the feet of the
government itself. Indeed, its actions have transformed the university into a frontline
for social struggle. The university, in accordance with government initiatives,
has increasingly become an institution ruled in an arbitrary, profit-motivated
manner by elites drawn from the corporate world (some with ties to the weapons
industry and others with ties to despotic regimes). As tuition fees have
increased and academic labour made more precarious, university administrations
have swollen in both size and cost while dramatically reducing student
representation in some universities’ governing bodies. University
administrations and boards of governors – bodies charged with acting as
stewards for publicly-funded and supposedly accountable institutions dedicated
to critical research and education – have come to increasingly resemble
corporate board rooms, with compensation packages to match. All of this has
come at the expense not only of funds devoted to teaching and research but of
the mandate of the university itself which is being transformed into little
more than an appendage for corporate profiteering.

Youth and students
are the future of any society and yet this fact is of no concern for political
and economic elites intent on enriching themselves by dispossessing the vast
majority of their capacity to live with dignity. To the elite demand that they
shoulder their “fair share” of this betrayal, youth and students are responding
with a resounding “no” to their own marginalisation. The Charest government has
adopted these recent measures as a direct attack on the student movement
itself which has a long history in Quebec of vigorously defending the
principal of publicly-funded education. The older generation of elites who
themselves benefitted from Quebec’s low cost and nearly free education are denying
the same open access to the current generation of youth and students, while opportunistically
attacking vulnerable members of society such as women, workers, immigrants and
refugees, and the poor of all ages.

The
brutality of police forces – condemned by Amnesty International – has only
increased the movement’s resolve. Police violence has involved the use of tear
gas, pepper spray, other chemical irritants, various types of concussion and
sound grenades, severe beatings with batons, and agents provocateurs, badly
injuring many dozens of students. Hundreds of protesters have been arrested and
each is now threatened with thousands of dollars in fines and even jail time.
The government has handed the police the power to pronounce the legality – or
lack thereof – of any given protest, linked to the student strike or not.
Despite this, the streets continue to swell with students and their diverse
allies exercising their collective power in a determined struggle for a public,
accessible, democratic, and critical education system and a society commensurate
with it.

Therefore:

·We publicly declare our
solidarity with the Quebec
student strikers and their struggle for free, democratic, and critical
education.

·Furthermore, we support calls
for initiating a broad, democratic assembly to analyze, debate, and come up
with fair solutions that brings politics back to support those social sectors
most in need.

·In addition, we call for a
suspension of any planned increase in student fees and for the abolition of
tuition fees and student debt.

·We also demand that Public Law
78 be repealed and that the Government of Quebec commit itself to respecting
the rights of students, and to avoid the mass use of indiscriminate force
against citizens who practice their right to free expression and peaceful
assembly.

·We thus remind Canada, as one
of the states that ratified the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and that it committed
itself, without reservation, to Article 13.2(c) (“higher education shall be
made equally accessible to all, on the basis of capacity, by every appropriate
means, and in particular by the progressive introduction of free education”).
We also urge the government of Quebec to respect the Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, particularly Article 3 on the
freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly, and Article 40 on the
right to a free public education.

Education
is a right!

Since the protests began, at least 2,500 demonstrators have been arrested, a tally which was published after this statement was produced.

This is the archive of what was formerly the webpage of AJP. It now consists entirely of the essays and posts published by AJP founder, Maximilian C. Forte, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, at Concordia University in Montreal (maximilian.forte@concordia.ca). AJP was a Canadian organization for anthropologists interested in supporting struggles for self-determination, decolonizing knowledge production, and resisting the corporatization and militarization of the academy.